Measured 2026-11-02 while a TV dedupe pass moved folders on the raw path: the
merged tree still answered stat at the old coordinates, link count 0, while ls of
the same parent no longer listed the name. Overlayfs keeps a dentry for a lower
file moved underneath it, so a tool that tests existence with [ -e ] against the
view can believe a file its own readdir denies — the media servers walk by
readdir, so this bites a script and never a user.
Recorded with it: every pass that moves or measures media walks /mnt/entropy, and
the one reader allowed to point at the view is the tool that needs show identity.
media-tvdupes.py censuses a TV library by episode key and never by folder. 10 of
the 25 shows that looked duplicated in the 2026-11-02 census held complementary
halves (Game of Thrones Complete carries no S01 or S08, Modern Family S05 is the
only copy of season 5), so a folder-level verdict would have staged some 340 GB
of unique episodes to recover 54 GiB of true copies.
Show identity comes from the folder's [tvdbid-N] tag, from the tvshow.nfo the
metadata view exposes, or from an operator --ids map. A derived id that
contradicts a tag is dropped and reported, never unioned: Jellyfin's provider
table carries a 2026 special's id on the folder tagged [tvdbid-73838], and
unioning the two makes one show of a 2000 series and a 2026 special whose bigger
files then dominate the original's pilot. Files named by an id key only when the
server's own episode table (the --witness) names them, so a bare number is never
mistaken for an episode.
Seam: tests/media_tvdupes.bats — 12 assertions on which files land in the plan
and which the tool refuses to touch, on a synthetic library.
The Movies library had indexed 2,571 films and had never asked a provider
for a single one: no TMDb id, no plot, no rating, no poster. Nothing was
broken in the provider chain — the plugin is core in 12.4 and active, its
key is set, image.tmdb.org answers the container — and nothing was broken
in the write path: the overlay view has been read-write since the 2026-10-31
cutover, and movie.nfo lands on the NVMe upper layer today.
The state was two settings in the per-library option file,
config/root/default/<Library>/options.xml (Jellyfin 12 renamed it from
library.xml; the database stores none of these options, so a census that
greps for the old name and then queries the DB concludes nothing is
configured and goes hunting elsewhere):
<EnableInternetProviders>false</EnableInternetProviders>
<TypeOptions><ImageFetchers /> (empty, beside a populated
<MetadataFetchers> and a fully
populated <ImageFetcherOrder>)
With the internet switch off every refresh answers 204, stores nothing and
logs nothing, so the item count reads like a healthy scan — this passed the
deploy health gate, the Playwright suite and three agent audits. Order is
not enablement: the fetcher ORDER stays populated while the ENABLED set sits
empty, and the populated metadata list beside it makes the library look well.
verify now audits every library's options.xml and fails with `SILENT INDEX
<Library>: <what>` on providers-off or on a type whose image fetchers are
empty while its metadata fetchers are named; an options.xml that never
carried the switch (BoxSets, written before the property existed) is the
vendor default and stays accepted.
Vault: the page claimed artwork is a sidecar like movie.nfo. It is not — no
image saver is bound for any library, so art goes to the internal store and
Plex never reads it. The claim is corrected, and the RemoteImages diagnostic
that separates a provider fault from a library fault is written down with
the 12.x API shape traps (Items needs UserId; MetadataRefreshMode has no
Full/ValidationFailure, ReplaceAllMetadata=true is what re-runs providers).
Frank